Materialists was sold as the summer's glossy love triangle: Dakota Johnson caught between Pedro Pascal's money and Chris Evans's charm, all of it wrapped in A24 sheen. That is the movie people bought a ticket for. It is not quite the movie Celine Song made. Before she wrote Past Lives, Song spent months working as a matchmaker in New York, sorting real people into a database by height, income, and the boxes they wanted checked, and Materialists is what she carried out of that job. Under the rom-com lighting, it is a cold, clear-eyed audit of what happens when you treat love like a market. The divided reaction proves it landed. Critics came around at 77 percent, and audiences walked out uneasy, handing it a B minus.
The Matchmaker Knew the Math
Lucy Mason (Dakota Johnson) is a former actress turned matchmaker at a firm called Adore, and her real skill is telling clients what they are worth on the open market, then shopping for a match the way you would spec a car. Harry Castillo (Pedro Pascal) checks every box: a wealthy financier, generous, tall, unbothered, the kind of client Lucy calls a unicorn. John Pitts (Chris Evans) is the ex she cannot shake, a theater actor who cater-waiters to make rent, which by Lucy's own metrics makes him a bad investment. Working from the job she actually held, Song shoots dating as procurement, all numbers and deal-breakers and the quiet math of what a person is supposedly worth. Song has said she took the matchmaking gig for money while writing plays nobody produced, and that clients really did hand over lists of demands, from height floors to income minimums, so the film's coldest lines are closer to transcription than invention. It is the same question that powered Past Lives, her aching 2023 debut that earned two Oscar nominations including Best Picture: how do we decide who gets to be the love of our life. Where that film was tender and unhurried, this one is clinical, and the casting carries it. Johnson plays Lucy with a flat, unreadable calm that first reads as competence and slowly curdles into emptiness, Pascal makes Harry so smooth he barely leaves a fingerprint, and Evans sheds every trace of movie-star polish to play a man the market has no use for. That is the film's real subject, and it is why the poster lies a little. This is not a story about which man Lucy loves. It is about whether love survives being priced. And it arrives as proof that a grown-up romance can still fill theaters, at a moment when films like His, Hers & Ours get parked on streaming instead.
When the Spreadsheet Draws Blood
The film has a turn that shoves it out of rom-com mode entirely. One of Lucy's clients, a woman named Sophie, is assaulted by Mark, a man Lucy matched her with, and sues Adore. Suddenly the tidy business of sorting people by spec has a victim and a lawsuit attached to it, and Lucy has to sit with her own part in what happened. It is the moment the movie stops being charming and starts being honest, and it is probably why some viewers bristled. They came for banter between beautiful people and got handed a reckoning instead. The ending is the point of the film, so treat this as a spoiler. Lucy accepts that she and Harry are compatible on paper and nowhere that matters, goes back to John, and in Central Park he proposes with a ring twisted from a flower, not a diamond. Song puts her thesis in a single prop: the thing with no resale value is the thing worth choosing. Whether that reads as romantic or as a dodge is the argument people are still having, and the 108 million dollars it made against a 20 million dollar budget says a lot of them wanted to keep arguing. A24 leaned into the love-triangle poster on purpose, which is what the split scores are really measuring: critics, primed to read satire, made it certified fresh, while audiences sold a date-night comedy handed it that B minus and a shrug. Neither side is wrong, because it really is a charming movie with three magnetic leads that really does turn on you. Even the marriage-license montage under the credits plays as hopeful or sardonic depending on your mood, and Song will not tell you which reading is right. If you want the earnest version of the same question, Reminders of Him plays it straight where this one plays it cold.
Materialists is not the comfort watch the trailer promised, and it is sharper for refusing to be. Song took a job most people would bury on a résumé and turned it into the most unsentimental thing said about dating in years: the market is real, the math is real, and her answer is a flower where the diamond should be.